im trying to play the BF-109 K-4 and P-51-D30 and keep dying to spitfires. No matter how I sideclimb they are always at either my alt or above, If I even manage to achieve a boom and zoom attack and they are aware of my presence they keep shooting me out of the sky when extending away. In addition, while using the K-4 (5.7), the spitfires at those BRs just, catch up to me and the Hispano cannon just makes short work of me from up to 700m away.
I am not that close from even getting to rank III in the british tree and so I don’t know how they fly. I do know the Hispanos and how good they are though and I know their sniping potential.
avoid them and fight weaker targets and hope that your teammates kill them instead, if they chase you run to your teammates (who hopefully arent too far away)
this is the easiest solution without just saying, get better at dogfighting and aiming
Spitfires have escaped the nerf bat that whack-a-mole’d the Japanese TT. First, give thanks that this experience is mostly just Spitfires and not Spitfires AND Zeroes. I am going to ignore BnZ with a positional advantage - I’m assuming you know how to do this and you asked for help dealing with Spits at or above your own alt. I am also going to assume you don’t just want to push repeated head ons.
It’s a tough fight - your only real option is to energy trap the Spit. That’s not easily done. It takes a while to build any meaningful speed advantage over them. Often times, you need to get the Spit to dive on you or dive with you so that you can use superior dive speed and LER to build an advantage. The Spit has MER that is just “OK.” Now, as a U.S. prop yours is terribad. The Spit stalls late and has great low speed control, so you cannot rely on an advantage there as a 109 pilot. That makes this a game of razor fine calculations. Your shooting window, even if you do everything right, is going to be VERY small. Using the keyboard to pull enough lead is a must. The mouse won’t get you there much of the time. Now, if you miss the pass you worked so hard on…
The Spitfire pilot of even modest competence will be thinking bout a reversal - and often times you’re slow coming out of the trap yourself. If you miscalculated your energy advantage by even a smidge, your only chance may be to keep diving for speed while you dodge their fire… and then you get to reset and do it all over again.
One of my most frustrating experiences in this game was a match in the P-38L-5-LO where I spent, literally, my entire tank of gas on a dog fight with one Spit. He didn’t quite stall, and the Spit turns and accelerates well enough that I could never quite pull the shot… it was just endless spirals and loops until the flashing red numbers sent me back to my AFLD.
Good luck.
ETA: this video is a Spitfire showcase. It might help you better understand the strengths… and see all the interesting ways folks manage to play into them.
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Imho the first step to get better is to analyze which Spitfire you are facing - and get familiar with their performance at various altitudes. Identification of the correct variant is, was and will be the key to win any engagement at this BR.
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Your first task is to distinguish between Merlin and Griffon powered variants. Why?
Whilst it is rather easy to energy trap a Merlin powered 5.7 LF Mk IX (just drag them above 7.5 - 8 km) things get really complicated if you meet the Griffon F Mk XIVe (5.7) which is very good and very fast at a 8 km. You might check the old wikipedia page. -
The attack strategies with a 109 were always centered around the 109 flow chart: Higher? = Attack, Lower? = climb more.
From my pov the 109s are no real BnZ aircraft due to their high speed compression / control surface lock up. So you want to be higher AND you want to make your enemy slow by climbing in spirals - to find the “right” diameter of you spiral is the challenge - too wide or too small and you might lose more energy than your pursuer. -
Getting shot down whilst extending is a clear sign that either your speed difference was too small or you pulled up to early (= still in gun range). Try to fight them like Zeros: Either enforce a very high speed head-on or make them too slow to dodge with an energy trap.
This seems to be best advice as the killing of axis vs allies (mostly, still active in small matches) weakened German teams significantly. - without strengthening US teams. Very high Spits were always swarmed by more or less all 109s as they knew that they are a tough opponent.
So in the current environment it makes sometimes sense just to keep them occupied, so you prevent them from murdering your team and hope that you get sooner or later support of a teammate.
…earlier this year in the 262 A-2a vs a Yak-3 VK 107. Even as i have done everything right (from my pov) and played by the book at altitudes between 5 and 8 km (always above 700 kmph) i was unable to hit a single shot - and i had an artificial hard deck limit as a Swedish A 21 RB stayed as low cover at 4 km for at least 10 minutes and spectated my attempts without actively interfering but preventing me from from him getting too slow and low.
Frustrating: Yes of course, but i met an excellent pilot and he did also not hit a single shell. So his MER countered my high speed acceleration advantage and a draw is nothing to be ashamed of.
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„Just“
I basically never fight at those altitudes, and why should players climb that high when after 10 min everyone is on the deck and killing AI for tickets.
For the enemy to even choose to climb that high your team needs to have the upper hand and even then your teammight all dive down on lower enemies, leaving you with nothing but time wasted.
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I am not here to judge about individual play styles - i gave a recommendation of how to deal with Spits from my pov.
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I simply try to determine where, when and with which energy states fights happen. As soon as you allow enemies to determine these parameters you set up yourself for a defeat.
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So if an enemy aircraft has superior performance at lower altitudes it is for me logical that i try to eliminate this performance advantage by dragging the fight higher.
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Dragging fights to high altitudes has the benefit that you reduce the number of opponents you have to fight at the same time and most players have zero clue how to fight at 8 km as maneuverability, acceleration and turn are severely affected.
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I mean Merlin Spits and A6Ms are classic rat planes - they have to rely on positional advantage and/or mistakes of their enemies. But whilst you can reset a fight vs a Zero rather easy, Spits are way faster, so you can’t allow them to outclimb you.
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Regarding everyone on the deck after 10 minutes: These enemies are no threat, i often activate anti-mech orders to drag more enemies low - just to reduce the number of enemies to fight at high alt.
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This might be your perception, but I recommend to play more matches with US aircraft like P-47s or P-38s vs UK and/or US/UK vs JP teams. Fightng 1 vs all after a few minutes in 30-40% of yor matches teach you what strategies work - and which not.
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Experienced enemies are real masters of “ninja climbing” (especially with contrail alts of 6.500 meters on Pacific maps) - simply because they need the positional advantage to get something done.
Frequent pilot of the spitfire mk24, LF mkIXc and mkVc trop here. You can kill us easily in a few different ways.
for early spitfires (mk1-2) their engines overheat fast and suffer at altitude while not being very fast. Stay high, stay fast and you are easy pickings.
for the mkV spitfires they climb good, turn as good as the orignals and have an engine that stays cool for long enough to turn forever. however they are still slower than the competition. if you can only attack from above and with a LOT of speed to get the hell away from them after an attack.
for the mkIX its just a mkV with a better engine but worse gun layout. same as before
If its an LF mkIX, Run. they are pretty fast at low altitude, will climb really well and you will not turn better than them and they dont really lose speed in turns either because of the merlin 66 engine being near as powerful as the griffons, but at more normal altutudes.
Griffon spitfires sacrifice some speed for monsterous amounts of speed, climb and high altitude performance. Low altutude turnfights is a weakpoint for them and they are quite heavy. if you get them slow they will struggle. only attack if they are slow is my personal advice
if its a mk24 spitfire honestly unless youre in a jet i would reccomend keeping the hell away. Its the best prop fighter in the game. I have only ever used it in GRB and frequently chase down jets in the thing while also not being 100% trash in bombs (british bombs are trash)
Can you tell me how to use the Spitfire LF Mk.IX with the short wings in AAB ? On paper it should be insanely good but in reality it can´t turn at all and it looses speed like crazy. That thing is the worst fighter i´ve flown so far.
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The only thing the clipped fire lf MkIx has is better roll and being faster (probably.)
Not much I can say since I don’t really play AAB. But yeah it is worse than the regular Spits.
So it´s just for BnZ ? The roll rate is needed in turnfights but that thing doesn´t turn at all so that´s useless. It´s not fast in low level flight either. The guns are medicore at best. Spaded it turns in 13,8s, climbs with 43,5m/s and has a top speed of 737km/h. No prop plane turns faster or climbs better, on paper, then this but in game you can´t even fight a P-47 in a turnfight.
Statcards are useless, don’t bother with them.
I mean, I guess so?
I refuse to use clipped wing spitties even in ARB. They’re niche and uncompetitive imo
If they´re useless then what are they for ? I mean I knew that in many cases state data´s x & y but the plane in game behave complete different from what the stats say but in this case it is insane. I don´t know how this plane is 5.3. Spading that trash is just pure pain.
They don’t neccessarily behave differently. It’s just that the stat cards give statistics without fixing altitude, fuel quantity, throttle position, RPM and whatnot.
Thus, they’re useless and pointless.
Statshark provides somewhat better data in its flightmodel screen.
The dotted line tells you where the best sustained turn is in terms of G-loading, IAS, turn radius and we know this is with minfuel and 110% throttle position with AEC.
This also tells you max instantenous turn (where the solid line is on the left) at various speeds and G forces.
It tells you min turn radius.
It’s not perfect, but it’s enough to approximate reality.
This has engine performance graphs for the other side of the equation.
This tells you about supercharger gaps at altitudes and ability to generate energy vs an aircraft.
They recently added a comparison mode too.
Finally there’s top speed which is in an excel sheet:
(War Thunder Top Speeds at Sea Level - Google Spreadsheets)
The stat card in game takes these 3 resources and gives you values for a random undefined point on it.
The wiki is somewhat more helpful:
Important:
Base Weight,
Fuel in main tanks.
Wingspan.
Length.
Wing loading.
Engine
Aspect is missing, but is somewhat baked into wing span.
Plane with less wing loading & better engine will sustain better.
Plane with bigger wingspan (and thus usually higher aspect) will turn tighter as a very, very, very coarse rule of thumb.
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Base weight is higher with 2.99t but Wing Loading is lower 157kg/m²,Wingspan is same 9.9m, Fuel in main tanks is lower 0.29t, Lenght is lower too 9,1m and the engine has way more power then the DB-601E. So the Spitfire should get the F4 but in game you stand absolutly no chance.
Unfortunately Air AB uses different physics so I cannot confidently make any statements.
In ASB an equal-skill the spitfire IX with a Merlin 66 tuned for low altitude, beats the 109 F-4. The Clipped wing israeli variant does looks much closer though:
I don’t think I’ve seen the clipped wing israeli one enough to give my own experience fighting it in the F-4 to support or disagree with the above graphs.
Air AB IIRC MASSIVELY boosts engine power and maybe has no control stiffening and rips right? IIRC flaps are unrippable as well. Maybe the F-4 that beat your spitfire used its combat flaps.
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I don´t even think the F-4 need combat flaps to get the CW Spitfire. I could barely kill a mosquito after he started turning and I don´t use flap on the CW Spitfire cause that´s like droping an anchor.
I guess I spade it and then never touch it again.
But thanks a lot for the help.
The clipped wing one in the Israel tree?
Clip wings sacrifice a large chunk of lift and subsequent STR for a major boost in roll speed, honestly the main gripe I have with LF mkIX is that roll speed at low altitude and high speeds.
You’re much less of a turnfighter than most spittys and are forced into more of a BnZ style of play. The mkIX has the airframe strength and the engine to do that really well.
Either way it’s better than the Canadian mkXIV with clipped wings as the engine is lighter with more horsepower at the altitudes we play in WT until the most extreme heights (to kill the space climbers)